


The Handover

by monsterkiss



Category: The Witch's House
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-05 12:44:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21208760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monsterkiss/pseuds/monsterkiss
Summary: Viola makes herself at home as best she can while the house prepares itself for a new master.





	The Handover

The house eats people. 

The bodies are legion and they are so, so close. They are pressed into the walls, trapped under the floors and the sickly smell of roses barely covers the stench of rotting offal. Their owners stumble around the halls intermittently, pale shades that evaporate within a few hours. They don’t understand what has happened to them, or they have forgotten.

Viola does not have that luxury. 

When she finally awakens in her bloodstained bed she believes she is dead. Another captured corpse decomposing while her spirit remains conscious, a parody of life after death. She lies there, playing her role until, hours or years later, she finds she can move.

She would have preferred her first guess.

The great wounds on her head are numb; she has no concept of the extent of the damage until she lifts her arms and her fingertips come to rest on her own shattered skull and splattered brains. She screams. It will be the last time.

Humans are pack animals that cry out for help, but there is no-one who will come to her aid, no matter how she cries.

Her eyes and throat still burn and the place where her legs should have been throbbed and stung. The pain overwhelms her from time to time and she throws her head back and keens.

She waits. Waits for whatever new, awful thing will happen to her. Hopes it will be fatal, if fatal is a thing that still applies. She waits a long time.

Then, one day, she takes the sheets between her fingers, gossamer softness caked in gore, and tears them to pieces. She bandages her wounds as best she can, fumbling in the dark of her ruined eyes, and with a deep breath, pushes herself off the bed and onto the floor.

The wood accepts her with a few bruises, but her arms are still strong.

She maps the room under her hands, paces it until she knows it by heart. It takes a little effort and no small amount of pain to lift herself to open the door, but she does. 

Hallway by hallway, room by room, she traces every inch of the house. She digs her fingers into the soft earth of the garden, washes her bandages in the pools, whispers to the suits of armor and the dolls. She brushes against the front door, and then moves on.

She does not heal. She can stem the bleeding but the wounds never leave. 

She endures. There is nothing else she can do. 

One day, the house removes a stairway. She pushes open a door to find the room she was looking for now on the ground floor. The books in the library begin to grow raised lettering. She follows a new scent to the dining room and a pot of cool, soothing tea that gives her throat some brief relief. 

She regards that last with deep suspicion. Whatever is watching her wants her to talk.

“How cynical! But I suppose I can see why.”

She turns towards the voice. It is low to the ground, on her level, warm and familiar, but there is a strange echo to it as though someone else were whispering just behind it.

“Hi there! We haven’t been formally introduced, in fact I have you at quite the disadvantage, so allow me to fix that. I’m the answer to your prayers.”

“I d… on’t p-praaay.” Her own voice surprises her. But then it’s not really her own, is it?

“Oh, everyone does, sooner or later.”

The voice is grinning. She doesn’t like it.

“Go… way…”

“Come now. Can you afford to turn down a friend right now? Although I suppose you haven’t had much luck with those, lately.”

She begins to crawl away.

“Hey! That’s very rude. At least hear me out. Wouldn’t you like a new set of legs, so you don’t have to drag yourself about like that?”

She stops.

“Oh ho! Now we’re getting somewhere. How about a new eye or two, to see how beautiful your new home is?”

“...ome?” She does not move.

“Of course. This house has always been a palace for lost little girls. It could be yours, too. Do you follow?”

She digs her fingers into the carpet.

“It can be more than just that. This house can free you from the confines of that broken body. It can become your legs, your eyes. It can give you more than you ever dreamed of.”

She turns back, staring without seeing. “W-wuh. Whi. _Witch._”

“Yes.” The voice comes closer, she can feel the air crackle with each near-silent footstep. “It’s simple, really. Make this house your own, take its power, power rightfully yours, by the way, and you will learn how to live beyond that mangled gristle of a body. In return… well, the house has needs, and we need your help to fulfil them. Just let it do its thing, follow its instincts. Feed.”

She turns back. She has been roaming the halls for a long time and her arms are terribly tired. Her wounds ache and she can feel that the stumps of her legs are bleeding through the bandages again. An insect, one of the many crawling things that scuttle around the house, skitters up one trembling arm, along her neck and through her lank hair until she feels the thing settle into one of the wounds on her head, one of many that have been burrowing into the mess of her mind.

“You could wake up tomorrow shiny and new, pretty and whole. It really isn’t-”

“No.”

She breathes the word out, and crawls towards the door. She wants to go back to one of the pools, feel the cool water against her skin. Wash off this conversation.

No such luck. The voice is in front of her in a heartbeat. “Hey, no need to be so hasty! Think it over, we can talk again-” 

She reaches out and pushes the voice away. Warm fur bristles at her touch.

Silence. She pulls herself to the door, but it does not budge at her touch.

“That girl…” The voice is smooth now, low, the whispered echo almost overwhelming it. “That monster who stole your body and your life and your father…” It’s close now, so close she isn’t sure it’s not coming from within her own head. “Do you think she deserves to walk away and leave you here? You could lure her here, this time with all the power of this place at your disposal. Yes, wouldn’t that be just the best house-warming gift? Show her what happens to creatures like that, taking advantage of kind-hearted people.”

She can see it. She can almost taste Ellen’s raw and tattered skin on her floorboards.

She heaves at the door with all her strength and this time it opens. She begins to crawl through the corridor beyond.

“She’s out there enjoying the life she took from you right now! She doesn’t have even the tiniest regret, she sleeps like a baby and she’d mutilate you again every day if it meant she got to keep living your life. She deserves to die, doesn’t she?”

Maybe there would be frogs at the pool today. She liked the frogs.

“And your father! That idiot who couldn’t even recognise his own daughter! Blowing your brains out and taking her home to love and cherish. Don’t you hate him? Don’t you want to show him what he did to you?”

She kept moving. The voice shouted and snarled, coaxed and flattered and threatened and charmed.

The girl kept crawling, one scuffed and bruised hand in front of the next, leaving a trail of glistening scarlet.

By the time she reached the pool the voice had faded into a spiteful silence that emanated from the walls in an oppressive haze. She felt very tired, and her wounds ached.

She lay down by the side of the water, trailing her fingertips along the surface until her arm was too heavy to hold.

**Author's Note:**

> I played the fancy remaster of this in the early hours of a cold October morning. The cruelty of the ending has always really stuck with me, it's just so crushing, so delighted by its own brutality. I wanted to write a fix-it, but when I actually sat down my soul had other ideas... I suppose some things stick with us because they hurt, because they're unfair and raw, and there's something a little sacred about that that oughtn't to be disturbed too much.
> 
> Or I'm just a miserable old sod spreading melancholia through the vector of my craft. One of the two.


End file.
